Let's Not Listen: Film and TV reviews

Quinceanera - Poster Boy

Quinceanera is a bible story set in the universe of of Hummer limos and gentrification. Old-world values clash against new-world realities in L.A.'s Echo Park neighborhood, where an extended Mexican-American family struggles with issues such as materialism, teen pregnancy, and homosexuality. There's little lecturing, though, in co-writers and -directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland's uplifting narrative, even as it fundamentally asks, WWJD?

The tolerant Christ figure here is Tio Tomas (Chalo Gonzalez), an elderly street vendor who feeds the hungry and embraces the outcast. He lives with his great-grandnephew, Carlos (Jesse Garcia), a gang member who has been disowned by his parents and therefore sparks an uproar when he drops by his sister Eileen's Quinceanera, a weddinglike ceremony to mark a Mexican girl's 15th birthday. Eileen (Alicia Sixtos), however, gets the royal treatment from the folks: Rather than focusing on the spiritual aspect of the commemoration, Eileen's day is one lavish party, with her friends cooing over her gorgeous dress, a stylized video remembrance, and a giant limo complete with stripper pole.

The film, which easily flows between Spanish and English, opens with this celebration but then shifts to Eileen's 14-year-old cousin, Magdalena (Emily Rio), whom later that night is told by her excited mother (Araceli Guzman-Rico) that someone has offered to alter Eileen's dress for her own upcoming Quinceanera. Naturally, Magdalena wants her own dress. And, if not that, at least the limo. But her preacher/security guard father (Jesus Castanos) not only doesn't have the money, he's determined to keep the event traditional instead of flashy. Magdalena pouts, but then finds out she has a bigger problem – she's pregnant, despite her insistence that she's never had sex with her boyfriend, Herman (J.R. Cruz). Her mother wants to support her but her dad throws her out of the house, leaving her with nowhere to go but Uncle Tio's  couch. He takes her in without question despite already sharing his home with Carlos, whom we find out is gay.

Quinceanera concentrates not on the teenagers' “sins,” but the good that lies underneath them. While the elders cluck over Magdalena's pregnancy – Carlos' sexuality is never really discussed – Tio, except for placing her picture on a backyard shrine, all but ignores it. Gonzalez is the highlight of the film, imbuing an already remarkable character with a pleasant gentleness as Tio tells stories and putters around his home. He expresses his unconditional love in the simplest terms: “I'm glad you have a friend,” he tells Carlos, who has been involved in three-way trysts with Tio's new landlords that secretly turns into a relationship with one. (His uncle doesn't know these details, however, even after things turn sour, with harsh consequences.)

Rio and Garcia, too, are understated and natural, though Garcia's Carlos hides his hurt under tough, silent, unsmiling posturing – Glatzer and Westmoreland are to be commended for completely avoiding the gay stereotype – though slowly becomes comfortable enough to reveal his strong sense of family and love of his new, untraditional clan. Rio's Magdalena, meanwhile, is a combination of innocent little girl lost – her pregnancy has a medical explanation but is deemed a miracle -- and spitfire teen as she at first fights those about to abandon her and comes to accept that she's about to grow up, and fast. In a time when 15-year-olds are still kids, Magdalena's  Quinceanera ends up being a true, joyous mark of her path to adulthood.

 

Poster Boy tells the story of a semi-closeted gay son of a conservative senator, but its audience will be put to the tolerance test more so than its characters. Zak Tucker's directorial debut, co-written by freshman  Lecia Rosenthal and Ryan Shiraki (scribe of 2004's superior Home of Phobia), may have Quinceanera's good intentions regarding unconditional love. But combined with its facile attempt at political indictment and across-the-board caricature, Poster Boy is less thought-provoking than just plain irritating.

Its very structure is off-putting: Framed as an obnoxiously gruff reporter's interview with Henry (Matt Newton), his clash with his campaigning father, Sen. Jack Kray (Michael Lerner), is recounted in flashbacks. A college student who's open about his sexuality on campus but not at home, Henry is combative when Dad demands that he introduce him at a rally to demonstrate his strong family values. Henry tries to get out of it but is blackmailed by a fellow student who's assisting Kray. Meanwhile, other students are organizing a protest, and we're introduced in a roundabout way to Izzie (Valerie Geffner), a sullen, ratty-haired woman who has HIV, and her gay roommate, Anthony (Jack Noseworthy).

Poster Boy is so sloppy it uses the same extra to walk by two main characters twice in a handful of seconds. In an attempt to be edgy – or something – Tucker uses a handheld camera to nauseating effect, bobbing around during even the most mundane conversations. (As well as the ridiculous ones – how about “The fact is that for me, the *flesh*, the *body*, the whole materiality of *being*, is not something one controls!” which Izzie spews at a party, for worst line of the year?) The main story, clearly based on Dick Cheney's hypocrisy regarding his administration's policies and his lesbian daughter Mary, is muddled by its confusing, undeveloped subplots. Maybe that's why it's so over-the-top: Kray is too hateful to be believed, slapping Henry – whom he only calls “son” -- as he demands his participation at the rally, “even if it means cutting a smile across your face with a knife.” (Yet, bizarrely for such a career-driven person, he tells Henry that he needs to “get his priorities straight” and find a girl.) Lerner, who also played Angry Dad last year's equally terrible When Do We Eat?, knows how to growl and threaten, yet can't help but look ridiculous in the role.

There are exactly two compelling moments in the movie. One involves a monologue by Henry's smarter-than-she-lets-on mother (Karen Allen) when she takes her husband down a peg for mistreating their son. The other is Henry's rant to his interviewer that pretty much summarizes Poster Boy's message, in case you missed it: that politicians push “issues” such as homosexuality in voters' faces to force them to take sides in the hope of gaining an edge, sometimes even if it's at the expense of their personal integrity. By this point, however, the film's integrity is long gone.

 

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

SNAKES on a PLANE

With no press screenings yet a year's worth of hype, Movie With the Name threatened to be a throwaway Boat to Heaven – what star Samuel L. Jackson said the producers might as well call the  film if they changed its title to the snooze-worthy Pacific Air Flight 121 as intended.

Happily, the brilliantly stupid Snakes on a Plane nom de crap stayed put, and surprisingly, it's a thriller so entertaining it makes recent disaster flicks such as Poseidon look like the real trash. Similar in concept to Scream, SoaP consciously mocks the we're-all-going-to-die formula of its genre while painting the numbers too cleverly to be banned to so-bad-its-good territory. The setup, if anyone cares, involves Sean, a murder witness (Nathan Phillips) whom one sorta-scary Agent Flynn (Jackson) persuades to testify. Flynn's escorting him out of Hawaii into protective custody on a flying machine that, despite extensive security precautions, the creative killer has rigged – with crates of serpents and leis sprayed with pheromones that will piss them off -- to shut Sean's mouth for good. Ergo: Snakes. Plane.

Directed by Final Destination 2's David R. Ellis and written by John Heffernan and Sebastian Gutierrez – with, famously, input from web-boarding boosters while, not so well-known, bearing a striking resemblance to a 1998 Saturday Night Live skit --  SoaP succeeds because its hamming is selective. The stereotypes, such as a flight attendant on her last day (Julianna Margulies), a princess carrying a chihuahua (Rachel Blanchard), and a better-than-thou prick who huffs about everything (Gerard Plunkett), are unabashed, and the snake-o-vision, sort of like looking through unfocused night-vision goggles, is cheesy. But the acting is fine (Jackson hasn't been as pitch-perfect tempestuous since Pulp Fiction) and the humor plentiful (watching a snake get peed on is unexpectedly hilarious).

Best, the filmmakers kept in mind that SoaP, title be damned, is meant to tense you up like a hug from a boa constrictor, and considering the action starts early, its stress level remains impressively consistent until the end. Drop the Plan 9 predictions and enjoy every motherfuckin' minute of it.

 

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Trust the Man - The Illusionist

When a romantic comedy opens with two fart jokes in about two minutes, you should probably brace yourself for the worst. A cast that includes David Duchovny, his charming Mulder long dead, isn’t a great sign, either. Come to think of it, the words “romantic comedy” are omen enough nowadays. Which all makes Trust the Man an imperfect if pleasant surprise—it barely skirts wacky and it drops plot lines, but there’s more than enough truth and humor here about love to revive this typically cheap-joke, contrivance-laden genre. Even the title, though ultimately a little baffling, could be considered a nice bait-and-switch: Ladies, tell your guy that you want him to come with you to see Trust the Man, and he’ll think, Undercover cops? Class warfare? Rings of prostitution and/or drugs? before realizing that it’s actually the kind of movie that tends to get slapped with that grating, long-tired nickname (hint: rhymes with ick-ick). Actually, dudes will probably be relieved to see that the male characters are not only spared women’s-fantasy emasculation, but they’re also pretty damn funny—and get as much screen time to bitch as the females do. Writer-director Bart Freundlich’s comedy centers on two couples: stay-at-home dad Tom (Duchovny) and actress Rebecca (Julianne Moore, Freundlich’s wife), who are married with a couple of tykes, and Rebecca’s emotionally stunted sportswriter brother, Tobey (Billy Crudup), who has spent seven happily untethered years with Elaine (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an aspiring children’s novelist. But the film spares us from clear heroes and villains: Tom’s a sex addict, and all Elaine’s got on the brain is having a baby—one a bit smaller than her clueless boyfriend. New York in winter is the setting, which not only reflects the film’s romantic difficulties but also feels right for a film that’s a cousin of a classic Woody Allen gab-/gag-/analysis-fest. Each couple goes through similar trials—the lure of affairs, the brief separations, the you-just-don’t-get-its. They even have conversations that are nearly parallel, regarding attractive women. Freundlich, probably best known for 1997’s The Myth of Fingerprints, has a knack for dead-on relationship details, whether it’s petty bickering during a foursome dinner date or a completely unrelated stressor—in one case, a towed car—inducing hysterics that swap “Shut the hell up!” for “I want to have a baby, and you don’t!” The rifts are less caustic than in, say, Allen’s Husbands and Wives, and the comedy is as often silly (the aforementioned wackiness includes a hypervigilant usher at the chaos-ridden opening night of Rebecca’s play) as it is sarcastic (“I guess you thought it’d be like marrying a hooker?” Tobey asks Tom, who kvetches about his wife’s lack of nymphomania). Moore and Gyllenhaal are radiant and sharp as women proactively struggling to make their relationships work, but the male leads are the true attention-getters: Duchovny, whose Tom tells a particularly twisted sexaholics support group that he likes to be wrapped in deli meats and then later admits that he lied (“I just wanted to fit in”), is relaxed and seemingly relieved to finally have the chance to play around with a decent script. And Crudup, usually Serious Indie Guy, is loose and nearly unrecognizable as Tobey, who’s simultaneously goofy yet obsessed with mortality (“Do you believe in fate?” Elaine asks him. “And not just that we are fated to death?”). Except for Bob Balaban, who, as he does in Lady in the Water, gets a laugh out of his few lines as Tobey’s professionally deadpan but personally volatile therapist, the cameos here are sadly wasted: Garry Shandling and Ellen Barkin are each thrown one scene and forgotten—along with subplots such as Elaine’s book. But these are petty quibbles if you subscribe to Trust the Man’s emphasis on forgiveness and big-picture thinking—and if you remember that it’s not Failure to Launch.   The Illusionist is more difficult to categorize: Let’s just say it’s the kind of film M. Night Shyamalan wishes he could still make. Written and directed by Neil Burger (based on a short story by Steven Millhauser), the movie is a period piece that incorporates the supernatural, romance, murder, and tyrannical authority into a refreshingly original plot—and may make ticketholders believe that screenwriters can still keep us guessing up until a satisfying end. Edward Norton, intense as ever, stars as Eisenheim, an increasingly popular magician in 1900 Vienna. In front of rapt audiences, he conjures tiny orange trees from seeds and makes a woman’s handkerchief disappear from the box she’s holding and reappear by his side. A chief inspector (Paul Giamatti) is initially a fan, but he’s soon ordered by Crown Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell) to figure out Eisenheim’s secrets, from inspecting the theater in which he performs to asking the magician directly to reveal the workings of a minor trick. When Leopold attends a show in which his betrothed, Sophie (Jessica Biel), volunteers to participate in a creepy trick that plays on the notion of the soul—and in which he ends up being fooled onstage—Leopold demands that the inspector step up his efforts lest Eisenheim be viewed as more powerful than the prince himself. After it’s revealed that Sophie and Eisenheim were childhood friends who lost touch but are clearly still drawn to each other, the royal “who likes to give his lady friends a good thrashing now and again” unsurprisingly goes batshit. The Illusionist could have easily gone ponderous. Nobody ever seems to smile, there’s not a lick of humor in the script, and, well, this is a period piece. But even Biel, whose main job is to look lovely, can’t spoil an interpretation this engrossing. Norton and Sewell make their characters worthy and sometimes rather frightening adversaries, lending them, respectively, quietly smug confidence and increasingly uncontrollable rage. Giamatti may not, for once, be Oscar-worthy here, but speaking in gravelly whispers, his inspector is nearly as absorbing as the apparent sorcerer. Composer Philip Glass, who added another layer of infuriating pretension to 2004’s Yes, redeems himself by keeping the score low-key and appropriately spooky as the magic man raises his game by seemingly resurrecting the dead. Touches in Eisenheim’s act, such as the sudden appearance of tiny butterflies and silvery, slithery clouds of “souls” add a delicate beauty to the progressively darkening story. And cinematographer Dick Pope wraps it all in a gorgeous package, bathing nearly each location as well as the cast in ethereal gold. In the film, a newspaper review of an Eisenheim performance asserts that the magician’s talent has developed beyond trickery and is approaching art. From start to finish, it’s a place The Illusionist has unequivocally reached.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Step Up

Have you seen Take the Lead, released just this past March? Then you’ve seen Step Up. The movies even share a cast member, Jenna Dewan, who, uh, takes the lead in Anne Fletcher’s debut. Dewan, a professional dancer, plays Nora, a student at the Maryland School of the Arts in Baltimore whose senior showcase could be her key to avoiding her mother’s deal that if the rug-cutting doesn’t work out, she must apply to some godforsaken place like Cornell.

Nora’s an uptown girl, and she’s never had a backstreet guy—that is, until thuggy Tyler (Channing Tatum), serving community service for trashing an elaborate set on the school’s stage, begins working there as a janitor. When Nora’s dance partner sprains his ankle and her auditions for a replacement are abysmal, Tyler, who likes to convulse to music with his friends, offers to help Nora practice. Of course, the bad boy’s perfect—in every dreamy way—even when he’s an hour late or bails on her completely. Soon, Tyler’s encouraging her to follow her original vision of not a couple’s dance but an ensemble Britney number.

You know the rest. Step Up has all the elements of a shamelessly predictable story: Teens from the ghetto giving rich kids the evil eye, a sassy best friend, the cold lady-who-lunches mom versus the warm works-at-the-all-night-diner mom, a tragedy, a triumph. One thing that’s missing, though, is character development. All Tyler and his buds (Damaine Radcliff and De’Shawn Washington) seem to do is wreck stuff, playfully push one another, and giggle until you can’t stands no more. The actors are merely adequate—the worst, surprisingly, is a stilted Rachel Griffiths as the school dean—and there’s only occasional, and very mild, humor in Duane Adler and Melissa Rosenberg’s script. On the plus side, Nora’s hair and practice outfits are pretty, and when the characters do start bustin’ a move, it’s impressive—and actually entertaining. The best way to approach Step Up is to adopt the pre-stepped-up Tyler’s perspective on life: If you don’t hope for anything, you won’t be disappointed.

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green - Barnyard

The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green quickly brings anyone not familiar with the gay comic strip of the same name up to speed: “Ethan is a man unlucky in love,” states the intro. “Don't feel sorry for him. It's his own damn fault. Really.” Love, though, is a relative term in George Bamber's debut film, written by new scripter David Vernon based on the hijinks of Eric Orner's strip. And the term unlucky doesn't quite apply, either. But if you can forgive a few – OK, many – gay stereotypes and consider the story to be less about misfortune in commitment than simply adventures in dating, the celluloid portrayal of Ethan's allegedly fab-free lifestyle is rather funny and, well, loafer-light.

In fact, we first meet the central character (Daniel Letterle) in a serendipitous moment: Holding an apple and looking skyward as he ponders his book, Finding the Boyfriend Within, in a park, Ethan is knocked out by an errant tennis ball. A recently divorced and outed baseball player, Kyle (Diego Serrano), gives him mouth-to-mouth, and it's lust at first tongue. Soon Kyle has penned an autobiography, with a dedication to Ethan -- “You make my every day a double-header” -- that makes the men at his book reading initially go “awww” and then turn to scowl at Kyle's pretty lover. In the meantime, Ethan's roommate and ex, Leo (David Monahan), is trying to tell Ethan that he's selling the house, and at an after-reading party, Ethan meets the egotistic force field that is Punch (Dean Shelton), a fast-talking, baby-faced 19-year-old who immediately reveals that his likes are “dick, dick, and more dick” and is also a part-time real-estate agent. Who happens to work with the world's worst realtor, Sunny Deal (Rebecca Lowman), a snarled, psychotic blonde guaranteed to keep Leo's house on the market for a lifetime.

Ethan Green purports to be a message movie, but it's not a concept that Vernon handles very well. That tennis ball soon becomes metaphorical, pounding the audience over the head with the sentiment “Ethan sabotages good relationships!” But until the groaner of a closing line – something about games, winning by refusing to play, etc. -- the one-note motif is easy enough to stomach, divvied pretty evenly among the characters to lecture their friend about in bits. Actually, most of Ethan's friends don't have much oomph, either. There's Charlotte (Shanola Hampton), another roommate who was recently dumped by her girlfriend and thus replaced all the pictures of her ex with images of her cat. Leo and Kyle are more story propellers than personalities.  And Ethan's mom (Meredith Baxter) is just plain bizarre: Though a planner of gay and lesbian weddings, she seems a little *too* accepting of her son's lifestyle, chatting easily about his porn collection and even saying hello during a webcam cruise that happens to connect to Ethan's other ex, who for some reason lives with her.

So what the hell saves the comic's big-screen transformation from ending up a costly mistake? Letterle, mainly, with great support from Shelton and also Joel Brooks and Richard Riehle, who both figuratively and literally add color as the Hat Sisters, two gossipy old queens whose fashion sense is a tacky take on Sunday best and who excel in the art of eye-rolling. Shelton's projectile delivery of the one-liners Vernon peppers his script with ensures that Punch comes off not as an insufferably smug and deluded kid but as ridiculous as intended, constantly talking about how gorgeous he is, aggressively pursuing Ethan – in one scene tearing open his shirt twice and then dropping his pants in a matter of minutes – and nonchalantly brushing off Ethan's flat-out rejections. But it's Letterle, who's in every scene, who carries the movie with both his physical comedy and deft timing. Whether taking gentle pratfalls with just the right amount of giggle-inducing obviousness (he's also a professional dancer) or reacting to lunacy around him with merely a slight start or eyebrow-raise, Letterle's Ethan is neither forcefully fey nor sitcom-y broad – and in a story that not-so-smoothly piles one romantic setback after another, that's pretty fabulous.

 

No one may want to make a respectful man out of Ethan, but the saying “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” ironically doesn't apply in Barnyard: The Original Party Animals. In writer-director Steve Oedekerk's animated feature, cows get married. And have babies while comfortably lying on their backs. And the babies coo and walk on two legs immediately after birth. Also, the male cows have udders. In other words, your children – who, now matter how young, probably understand that cows go “moo” and not “my husband was killed in a storm” --  may have to be rewired by a science class.

Then again, Oedekerk's the guy responsible for assaulting audiences with 2002's Kung Pow: Enter the Fist, so compared to a live action, three-boobed woman, maybe these modifications aren't quite as  irritating. And neither is the movie itself – boring is a much better description of it. The premise is a thin one: When a farmer (Fred Tatasciore) is away, his animals play...I mean, “party.” They craft boogie boards to take out-of-control rides down hills. They use cell phones to buy “gray market” items from underground gophers (get it?). And at night, they throw wild, well, barn burners: Drinking, dancing, and college-party chaos is the reward for their usual daily placidity. It's all spearheaded by Otis (Kevin James), much to the chagrin of his father, Ben (Sam Elliott), who takes the responsibilities for organizing meetings and watching over the hen house – passing the time by singing “I Won't Back Down” -- so coyotes don't snack on the birds at night.

The time comes, however, for Otis to grow up and become a leader himself, and anyone who's seen a movie before knows the rest. The result is a swell enough message for kids (though promoting crazee   misbehavior when an authority figure's back is turned perhaps isn't the best idea) and they'll likely find the sight of animals goofing around pretty amusing – for a while. The parties are shown over, and over, and over again, and when the movie goes Bambi, the immediate reaction seems to last forever. Oedekerk also isn't the most original humorist, blatantly modeling a human character on South Park's Cartman, right down to bits of dialogue.   

To be fair, there are a few funny bits here and there: a frail dog on crutches who's about to turn a mere 13; a nosy, shrill neighbor (Maria Bamford) of the farmer who's constantly calling the police about the seeming nogoodnik, much to the annoyance of her beer-drinking, beaten-down husband (Oedekerk); a Cops sendup when a few of the animals go get revenge on a cow-tipper. Compared to recently released animated features The Ant Bully and Monster House, Barnyard is a disappointment. Then again, a movie in which a  singing cow – even a male one with bodacious udders – introducing kids to Tom Petty can't be all bad.

 

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

Little Miss Sunshine - Ricky Bobby

Little Miss Sunshine has a precocious kid with giant glasses, Steve Carell, and a  name cloying enough to hurt your teeth – and it's also depressing as hell. The plot is simple – a family drives from New Mexico to California so their young daughter can participate in a beauty pageant. But the topics that pop up along the way are not: The debut of co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and also scripter Michael Arndt incorporates addiction, bankruptcy, death, divorce, and squelched dreams into this road trip. It's hard to imagine a sadder journey. Especially one that, well, simultaneously makes you laugh.

The Hoover family is already barely keeping it together before they load themselves into a VW bus and head for the titular pageant. Sheryl (Toni Collette) hurriedly throws fast food on the table for dinner and  has just taken it upon herself to care for her suicidal brother, Frank (Carell), after he leaves the hospital with bandaged wrists. According to doctor's orders, Frank, a Proust scholar who lost a boyfriend, his job, and then his apartment, must never be left alone, and therefore shares a room with Sheryl's brooding teenage son, Dwayne (Paul Dano). Dwayne wants to become a pilot – and, influenced by Nietzsche, has taken a vow of silence that's thus far lasted nine months. There's Richard (Greg Kinnear), Sheryl's worse half, who is desperately trying to brand his self-help program on being a “winner” when, in fact, his ideas of victory and positive thinking make him a reprehensible human being. Richard's foul-mouthed dad (Alan Arkin) also lives in the Hoover home, having been kicked out of a retirement facility for snorting heroin.

And, of course, there's little Olive (Abigail Breslin, whom you might have seen in Raising Helen but will more likely remember from Signs). Olive's 7, obsessed with beauty pageants – she watches them on video and mimics those crowned – and, despite her gap tooth and pot belly, finds out that she is now eligible to compete to be a Little Miss Sunshine because of a more scheming girl's disqualification.  Amid all the chaos, she might have never found out: The fried-bucket repast quickly heads south as Frank's “accident” is discussed, Dwayne writes in his notebook that he hates everybody, Grandpa bitches that everyday they eat “goddamn fucking chicken,” Richard becomes increasingly uncomfortable/insulting and Sheryl tries to not jump out a window. Then Richard casually mentions a  message about little-miss-something. Olive runs from the meal from hell to the answering machine of her potential salvation – and Breslin's pogoing, then squinting, then screaming Olive briefly flickers the movie with a moment of pure joy.

But Richard's got this thing this weekend, Sheryl can't drive a stick, they can't afford to fly, and leaving Grandpa, Frank, and Dwayne the run of the house is clearly a bad idea. As Olive's running herself into a tizzy, the adults again deflate. Then Richard gets down to look Olive in the eye and ask if she's sure she can win – and her affirmative response is all he needs to agree to pack the herd into the bus and drive them to California.

Surely, everyone knows how these road trips go. The label on this potentially tired setup, in blinking neon,  is “family dysfunction.” And, yes, with its juggling of jokiness/despair, some of this Sundance hit may seem familiar – think Napoleon Dynamite, only with more than one joke. (Ignore, however, the “Where's Olive?” tagline, which suggests it's Home Alone 12.) But even with its occasional notes of wackiness – a broken clutch means they have to push the bus to start it and then scramble to jump on, for instance – Little Miss Sunshine's script so  deftly captures the emotion behind each setback that it's less like a sitcom than a clan's real day-to-day life squashed into 101 minutes. It's a testament to what getting forced out of your own routine and head can do – sitting in a hospital, say, would have never brought the smile to Frank's face that a successful clutch-popping attempt does. (“No one gets left behind!” the professor triumphantly declares.)

The cast is uniformly excellent, from Arkin's gruff grandfather ranting breathlessly on topics such as his studliness at the old folks' home (“I had second degree burns on my johnson!”) and doing drugs “I'm old!”) to the role Kinnear was born to play, a smug, khaki-shorts-wearing know-it-all who abhorrently points out to Olive that beauty queens probably don't eat ice cream and that “Uncle Frank gave up on himself, and that's something that winners never do.” As the deadline for the pageant check-in nears, everybody is so drained from their personal and collective issues that all focus touchingly turns toward fulfilling Olive's naive dream – and then debating whether to shield her from it when they see all the creepy JonBenets with their expensive costumes and years-honed talents. Ultimately, they leave it up to her, and the result is a jubilant testament against, in a word, bullshit. The moral of the story comes from Dwayne, who, no longer silent, realizes that his dad's emphasis on always winning will screw you up but good: “Fuck beauty contests. Life is one fucking beauty contest after another.” 

 

A child in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is also influenced by a dubiously go-get-'em father: “If you ain't first, you're last,” Reese Bobby tells his son, Ricky, who was born in a speeding car. He shares this wisdom  when he gets kicked out of Ricky's school on Career Day, after years of absence. And then he disappears on Ricky again.

Even though the no-good, no-job Reese (Gary Cole) doesn't even remember giving this advice when  Ricky (Will Ferrell) is grown -- “That don't even make sense – you could be second, you could be third...” -- it doesn't really matter. Ricky already had a love of speed and hunger to win implanted in what serves as his brain. He becomes a member of a NASCAR pit crew, and when the opportunity comes up, midrace, to substitute for a lazy driver, the Ballad begins. (Actually, it begins with a quote about America's need for “hot, nasty, badass speed” -- attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt.)

Directed by Adam McKay and co-written by McKay and Ferrell – the same matchtup responsible for 2004's Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy – Talladega Nights exists mainly to 1) get Ferrell back on, uh, track (sorry) after his roles in the awful Bewitched and Kicking & Screaming and 2) make fun of white-trash NASCAR lovers. The premise is pretty thin, but the filmmakers get a fair amount of, um, mileage (sorry again) out of it. Ricky wins that first race and becomes the It driver, marrying a glaringly blond trophy wife, Carley (Leslie Bibb), naming their two mouthy boys Walker and Texas Ranger, and staying true to his grade-school best friend, Cal (a hick-puppyish John C. Reilly), all while lovin' America.

It doesn't take long for Talladega Nights to get the stereotypes of its target out of the way: Ricky's car is sponsored by Wonder Bread, his family eats a buffet of fast food every night, Skynyrd's king, foreigners are weird, etc. The subject's a softball, but Ferrell's vaguely Dubya-accented shtick makes it work for a while, whether Ricky is timidly giving his first on-the-track interview (the way his hands gravitate toward his face even though the inteviewer says to put them down – you have to be there) or later brashly making commercials for any and all products (“I'm Ricky Bobby, and if you don't chew Big Red, then fuck you”). Among the broadness are a couple of subtler  jokes, such as Ricky's answer to the question of why his rival, the French Jean Girard (Sacha Baron Cohen, aka Ali G), came here: “Public schools? The healthcare system?” But mostly, it's all beer and balls.

A long segment in which Ricky loses his touch lags, saved only by The 40 Year-Old Virgin's Jane Lynch as Ricky's mother and Junebug's Amy Adams, once again proving she can deliver mouthsful of dialogue with ardent and impressive speed as Susan, Ricky's manager and eventual love interest. Unlike Anchorman, these blander moments suffer from a lack of cameos from the usual Ferrell clan – Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Steve Carell (though perhaps “I love lamp” isn't the kind of dumbness they were going for here). After going from full-on laughs to forced giggles, however, Ferrell and McKay successfully resuscitate the audience with never-fail outtakes – which should leave you happier than a  celebration dinner at Applebee's.

 

copyright 2006 themoviebabe.com

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The OH in Ohio

It's nearly impossible to avoid metaphoric, quote-whore criticism of a movie about orgasms, so let's get     it out of the way: Billy Kent's directorial debut, The OH in Ohio, gets this close -- but doesn't completely satisfy.

Quirk queen Parker Posey is Priscilla, a Cleveland ad exec who is married to Jack (Paul Rudd), a high school science teacher. But Jack is haggard, moody, and not-so-slyly drinking on the job, all because though the couple has had sex 1,482 times (she tends to count things), Priscilla has never had an orgasm, even by herself. Jack loses it and leaves her (i.e. moves out to the garage), which finally makes  Priscilla determined to fix things. One masturbation class (with the teacher, played by Liza Minnelli, saying things like “liberate your labia!”) and vibrator later, Priscilla is enlightened and addicted – and, naturally, it changes her life. Meanwhile, Jack is rescued by Kristen (Mischa Barton), one of his stoner-turned-Merit Scholar (!) students who ridiculously tunes in to his exact problem, says “You're in pain. I want to help,” and takes charge from there.

The debut script by Adam Wierzbianski (based on a story by Kent and Sarah Bird) has its funnier moments amplified by the cast, particularly Rudd, who first uses his talent for perfect deadpan and later is yelling out “My cock's jammin'! It's *jammin'*!” when his character is rejuvenated by Kristen. Also entertaining is Keith David as Jack's “technology”-loving confidant and Danny DeVito as Wayne, a carefree, longhaired swimming-pool entrepreneur; It's a bit odd to see the usually typecast Posey playing a rather normal, if f/rigid, woman, but her Priscilla is giddy and charming as she makes the transformation into a labia liberator.

Cleveland natives will be happy to see their city portrayed as having corrected its mistake-on-the-lake status, with several aerial shots of a dense downtown and an outright marketing pitch slickly incorporated as Priscilla tries to woo a large corporation to do business there. The movie sinks, though, whenever Barton's onscreen, between her shallowly drawn Magical Whore and flat delivery of lines that alone are Wierzbianski's worst. (“I know Playboy Advisor bullshit,” she says in a forced tantrum.) And even at 88 minutes, it just goes on too long. Pre-vibrator Priscilla would sympathize.

 

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